How to Manage Your Reputation Online

Though social media websites and the content contained within them might feel fleeting, the truth is that these sites have the potential to notably and permanently affect anyone’s reputation. Content submitted to sites like Facebook and Twitter is permanently archived and, in Facebook’s case, it’s actually never deleted — even if the user removes it from their own profile or photo album. In a world where every inappropriate comment or error in judgement is saved for posterity and made public, it is more important than ever to self-censor and explicitly focus on privacy controls. Those two things will stand firmly in the way of a damaged reputation online.

Privacy Settings: Get Acquainted and Get Strict

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Twitter users can choose to either make their tweets public or show them only to people they have approved. This binary approach to privacy is simple, and those who value their online reputation should choose to require approval before anyone sees a single one of their tweets. However, this simple approach cannot be found at Facebook, as the world’s largest social network takes a much more nuanced approach to privacy and reputation management.

Facebook’s version of privacy comes in the form of filters, restrictions, and exceptions. Users of the popular social network should familiarize themselves with the default sharing settings, which usually involve broadcasting photos and status updates to “everyone” or “friends of friends.” Neither one is a particularly good idea; luckily, Facebook allows for the retroactive modification of a post’s privacy when a user is tweaking their settings on the site.

Within the “Privacy Settings” page maintained by Facebook, users should restrict every type of content to friends only. That means photos, status updates, notes, likes, and tagged posts should all be made strictly private. Furthermore, they should employ the “modify old posts?” feature to uniformly make everything ever posted on the site viewable only to their friends. Google and other major search engines won’t be able to find this information.

Photos: Would You Want Everyone to See That?

The proliferation of social networks has somehow changed the way people perceive photos, as once-private pictures of late-night escapades become hilarious public material. That might be funny for a few hours or a few days, but it won’t be funny when they get you into trouble. If your Mom shouldn’t be seeing what happened on Saturday night, then neither should Facebook or Twitter users. There are some things that have traditionally been kept private for a reason, and they should stay that way.

At the very least, be sure to post pictures only within a tightly-controlled album. That means specifically avoiding more public photo sharing services like Twitter or Twitpic, Instagram, and other social photography websites. Facebook allows tight control of photo album privacy, and this might be the best bet. Restrict photos from all non-friends, and your reputation might stay intact. Still, the most scandalous photos should be restricted to a personal and private collection on a local hard disk.

Things on the Internet Never Die — Ever. Really.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg achieved a bit of misguided press attention when he publicly confessed that Facebook doesn’t really delete anything that users post to it. Even if they delete photos uploaded to the website, they’ll stay on Facebook’s servers perpetually. That’s scary enough, but it’s not the only place that the Internet shows off its elephant-like memory.

Not only does Google index virtually everything online, but it keeps a “cache” of websites that it indexes. It might find a pretty bad status update or photo and, even though the user has deleted it, the search engine will still link to a cached version of the site that features the inappropriate content. This shows that Google’s memory is perhaps the most dangerous of all.

And, if Google wasn’t bad enough, there is actually an entire website and organization dedicated to archiving the Internet for posterity. It is known as Archive.org, the outfit runs the “Internet WayBack Machine,” which actually archives and indexes sites on a date-by-date format. This archive presents blogs, news sites, and even social networking profiles, as they were on any day when the service indexed them. Even deleted things will remain forever, as part of the collective Internet “heritage.” That’s a scary prospect for just about anyone, especially those who have shared an inappropriate thought or two with major social networking sites.

Caution and Common Sense are the Keys to Reputation Management

In the digital era, there is no amount of common sense or caution that should be considered excessive when it comes to sharing thoughts or photos. Indeed, if your Nana shouldn’t see something, then it should generally be kept away from the Internet entirely. Value a small collection of photos on a hard disk, vent frustrations to close friends, and save yourself from future embarrassment.

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About Author

Jessica Ruane is a savvy San Diego blogger and cat enthusiast. She loves researching bizarre crimes and is never surprised by all the weird, wonderful, and strange things that people do every day. She studied literature and creative writing at UC Santa Cruz and has a die-hard passion for the written word. Find her on Google+

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